Strange New Rules

Issue #1: A new magazine of stories, studies, and science

In this issue: (Re)launch notes, Chiang’s Law, Chosen Ones, Great Men vs. Great Bureaucrats, Straussian Romantasy and Idiot Theories, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords, protocolization debt, Whitehead advances, worlds and rules, protocol fiction workshop in Austin.

(Re)launch Notes

Today, we’re launching a new magazine on Substack, Protocolized, devoted to fiction, case studies, and nonfiction research essays about protocols. Hence our new tagline: stories, studies, science.

Strictly speaking, this is a reboot and migration to Substack. For the past two years, this has been a utilitarian news updates and events email list for the Summer of Protocols program. While we’ll continue to cover those core program-related beats, we feel we’re now ready to level up. The main act, going forward will be magazine-style feature content. If the themes interest you, we invite you to consider submitting a pitch or two. To do this, join our Discord and post a short pitch in the #pitches channel.

We have an ambitious goal: To catalyze a whole global scene around protocols, with a particular focus on a brave new genre of protocol fiction that we think is just itching to emerge, with associated speculation, theorizing, research, and technical / cultural / social analyses. The stories, which we hope you’ll help us tell, are how we envision everything coming together.

We hope to do for protocols what Astounding magazine, one of our inspirations, did for science fiction and technological literacy in its 1940s golden age. Or what the Whole Earth Catalog did for technology-adjacent counterculture in the late 60s and 70s.

This magazine will be the main venue for our scene-making efforts, but we will also be supporting meetups, workshops and such. We’re starting with a protocol fiction workshop next week. If you’re a fiction writer based in Austin, TX, join us!

Readers who have been following the Summer of Protocols program over the last two years need no introduction to the topic, but for those just joining in, you might be wondering: What are protocols, and why are they interesting? And why bother trying to build a techno-cultural scene around them?

Well, we have two years worth of research from the Summer of Protocols you can explore for answers. You can start with the Protocol Reader, a volume of 26 essays and 2 fiction pieces we are releasing today as an ePub. It’s a meaty 300+ page read that we guarantee will protocol-pill you, and change how you view the world forever. Just load it into your reader app or device and dive in. We’ll have you protocol-literate and caught up with our two-year-young conversation in no time. This is an ancient subject, but a young intellectual discipline, so it is surprisingly easy to speedrun your way to the frontier. No special 10x talents or esoteric knowledge necessary. The Protocol Reader is not quite as easy a read as a breezy airport bestseller, but we promise you it is way more rewarding, even if we do say so ourselves.

There is a great deal more material from the program, including dozens of videos from our salons, case-studies about real-world protocols, and a variety of multimedia artifacts – avant garde videos, digital sculptures, and so on. We are working on getting it all better organized and discoverable. But for now, take a run at the Protocol Reader, we promise you won’t regret it.

But we hope all this material will do more than just stimulate and entertain. We hope it will inspire you to begin thinking, researching, writing about, and building protocols yourself, and we hope you’ll pitch us your best ideas to publish in this magazine. We regard our archives from the first two years as a quiet priming of a pump. As we head into the third year of this program, we are going to try and get the pump itself going. And we’ll need your help, because we’re just a bunch of ordinary people trying to make this happen, backed by a small summer research program running on a shoestring budget.¹

With that preamble out of the way, I want to set the tone here, and share a few thoughts we on the editorial team have been discussing as we’ve been planning for this launch.

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Chiang’s Law

Our north star for this magazine is something I like to call Chiang’s Law, after the science fiction author Ted Chiang. This law can be stated compactly as: science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people.

The statement summarizes a point Chiang has made discursively in various speeches and interviews, in the context of broader discussions of science fiction and fantasy. According to Chiang, science fiction is the literature of change, while fantasy is the literature of changelessness. Science fiction is the process of figuring out how the machine works, even as we work to evolve it, and evolve with it. Fantasy is a pleasant escape into a dream where the universe sees you specifically, and recognizes your specialness. And you are special because you, and you alone, can restore the world to some changeless state of grace it has deviated from.

Whether the story is about spaceships or dragons is irrelevant. If the protagonist is a Chosen One in some sense,﹣someone the universe recognizes individually, and treats as special,﹣you’re dealing with a fantasy story. On the other hand, if the protagonist deals with rules that might perhaps be strange, but apply to everyone in the fictional universe, you’ve got yourself a science fiction story.

The reason science fiction is more strongly associated with technology is that technology tends to harness natural phenomena in new ways and throw us all unceremoniously into alien regimes, with no possibility of restoration of old states. Regimes that require us to invent strange new rules to survive. But also rules that apply to everybody equally. Rules that do not pick out anyone as special.

Chiang’s Law is a revealing lens on the modern world.

For example, Silicon Valley technology discourses, which you’d think ought to follow science fiction rules, actually tend to follow fantasy rules, focused on “Great Men” or “10x programmers,” who are Chosen Ones destined to restore some sort of glorious past of flourishing innovation. Though Silicon Valley technology discourses are focused more on the future than the past, and concerned with semiconductors more than dragons, they have more in common with Lord of the Rings than Foundation.

Similarly, socialist discourses, which you’d think would be about ordinary people, often end up being about purity-tested special people led by Great Bureaucrats who are the purest of them all, and get to define purity for others.

All this is, of course, part of a broader reactionary turn in the global zeitgeist. As Chiang-Law-certified science fiction author David Brin noted over a decade ago, our favorite cliche is a “world full of idiots” that perennially needs saving by Chosen Ones of one sort or the other.

Unfortunately, valorizing traditional bureaucrats as selfless, public-spirited citizens who treat the average human better than mythic heroes do is equally misguided. It merely replaces an on-the-nose and in-your-face special person, the Great Man (it is nearly always a Great Man, and these days, often a Great Billionaire as well), with a more subtle and retiring one, the Great Bureaucrat (a less gendered, but equally “special person” stereotype). Instead of specialness being validated by the act of drawing a metaphoric sword out of a stone, it gets underwritten by mythic institutional careers and sacralized educational pedigrees.

Both regular dragon-slaying heroes, and what are sometimes called bureaucratic heroes, treat the average person as an idiot. Just in different ways. Great Men and Great Bureaucrats are just two sides of the Chosen One coin. Both claim and exercise authority in ways that ordinary people are deemed incapable of meaningfully claiming and exercising.

This is not a new observation. Over a century ago, Vilfredo Pareto, building on Machiavelli’s earlier theories, proposed that power tends to cycle between two kinds of elites, which he dubbed lions and foxes. Lion elites and fox elites map precisely to what I’ve been calling Great Men and Great Bureaucrats. Neither is a friend to the ordinary individual, but both strenuously claim to be.

But sometimes, when the world is changing radically thanks to technology introducing strange new phenomena into it, the circulation of elites can turn turbulent and unstable, resulting in an unusual degree of intra-elite conflict, Chosen One vs. Chosen One. Great Men vs. Great Bureaucrats.

Such fractious eras can be terrible to live through, as we are all finding out now, but they do have a silver lining: They create an opening for the ordinary individual to gain agency at the expense of both kinds of elites. For the Unchosen Ones to make some real gains.

These gains typically take a very particular form: better protocols.

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Great-on-Great Violence

Real-life, self-styled Great Man types typically treat supporters as mindlessly loyal, enthralled sycophants, and detractors as equally mindless hostile zombies to be contained and stripped of all agency with extreme prejudice, often through direct coercive violence and intimidation.

The typical real-life Great Bureaucrat is not much better: All ordinary people are to be treated with apathy and indifference from the security of institutional fortresses, and stripped of agency using inscrutable and byzantine governance mechanisms. Here too, there is often violence, though often of a disguised and indirect variety, involving what Nadia Asparouhova has dubbed Kafka protocols.

Both Great Bureaucrat and Great Man archetypes of heroism are arguably products of pure fantasy and myth-making. Both are founded on the idea of Special People who must be allowed to exercise unaccountable forms of authority because they have been recognized and chosen by the universe in some way, to exercise authority over the rest of us, who have not been so blessed.

And enough people believe in both varieties of Special People that we find ourselves caught between knee-jerk defenses of sclerotic institutions and mindless attacks on them.

Our narratives tend to focus exclusively on the superficial deportments of Special People — the retreating self-effacement of the sophisticated Great Bureaucrat vs. the charismatic theatrics of the populist Great Man. But the shared epistemic commitment to Greatness as an explanatory model goes largely unchallenged. We are so busy fighting over the relative merits of Pareto Lions and Pareto Foxes, and accusing each other of elitism, we forget to question the shared premises of all elitism.

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Great Regulations, Great Accelerations

The title of a classic conservative political text, Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a basis for policy, today describes the political postures of Great Bureaucrats and Great Men alike. We tend to compare and contrast visions, but ignore the arbitrary processes of anointment and self-congratulation that underwrite them, and the resulting capture of agency from un-anointed commoners.

And so we find ourselves in a world trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of mindlessly defended decaying public institutions that need re-imagining and malicious actors claiming mythic authority trying to capture or vandalize them.

The reasons for this turn towards unbridled fantasy across the elite spectrum are, of course, obvious. We live in a world of Industrial Era institutions that need reimagining, and patient, public-spirited rebuilding in light of rapidly emerging wild technological capabilities. We also live in a world that is several decades into an equally sclerotic Industrial Era theology of free markets that need reimagining.

If you lack the patience and pluralist public-spiritedness required to figure out and operate by strange new laws, the “world full of idiots” narrative is very attractive. So long as you and your Chosen One can convince yourselves of three things. That all the idiots are on the other side. That Great Regulations or Great Accelerations are the answer. And that turning the answer into reality merely requires eliminating hostile idiots from positions of power.

And so we find ourselves hopeless, trapped in a world framed by narratives of stasis (and most visions of “acceleration,” rather ironically, tend to fetishize a kind of historicist process stasis) rather than one being powerfully molded and reoriented by actual ongoing changes in the environment.

A world lacking a true literature of change in Chiang’s terms, and resigned to fighting over competing theories of elite-led changelessness.

We here at Protocolized believe there is a way out of this bind: better protocols!

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Idiot Theories

A world that needs Great Men or Great Bureaucrats to keep rescuing it through heroic deeds, usually deeds of restoration, is necessarily a world that treats its average member like an idiot.

The Great Bureaucrat hopes to restore a New Normalcy through Great Regulations. The Great Man hopes to restore capital-P Progress through a Great Acceleration. Both treat the vast majority of humans as non-special idiots to be contained.

This ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, when it comes to building technological systems. Systems built upon the principle that the average person is an idiot will in fact reduce the average person to an idiot, regardless of their actual abilities. And even if such functional idiots aren’t actual idiots, and even if unironic worship of mythologies of Greatness is restricted to clueless minorities within each tribe, the effect is the same. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, cynicism by itself is not sufficient to resist a world ruled by Chosen One fantasies. Given a strong enough Idiot Theory driving governance, the difference between cynicism and surrender becomes irrelevant, and pretense of consent by the governed is as good as sincere consent.

Both the Great Man theory of change and Great Bureaucrat theories of governance are functionally equivalent to Idiot Theories of the general population. In fact, the two theories usually harmonize so well that they are indistinguishable in their treatment of ordinary people.

The current war among elites starkly reveals the extent to which neither philosophy centers on the interests of ordinary people.

Both theories fit the Chiang’s Law understanding of fantasy: a world with special rules for special people, and idiot rules for the rest of us. That different groups are “special” under the two schemes is a distinction without a difference for the rest of us. Does it really matter whether a long-term career bureaucrat or a billionaire treats you like an idiot, good only for exercising agency conditioned on unquestioning loyalty? Do you care which specific purity test screens you out for thinking for yourself?

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Straussian Romantasies

Political philosophies based on two such sets of rules — one for trustworthy anointed elites, one for everyone else — are sometimes called Straussian, after the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss. Straussian philosophies formally justify making a distinction between Great Men (or Great Bureaucrats), to whom special rules (or no rules) apply, and ordinary people, who can be justifiably treated like idiots.

Straussian philosophies are often assumed to be right-coded, but the underlying paternalism can be found both on the Right and Left, and in nominally libertarian polities as well as authoritarian ones. Straussian attitudes can be found in billionaire war-rooms, bureaucratic committee meetings, powerful old media newsrooms, and exclusive academic conclaves for gray eminences. People who imagine themselves to be special, and justified in telling noble lies to the rest of the world, can be found just about everywhere.

But unlike the world of just a few decades ago, the world of 2025 is not governed by dry and analytic Straussian political philosophies as such, but by Straussian romantasies. Paired narratives of mythic proportions unfolding in parallel in lay public and elite private discourses (or what Straussians refer to as exoteric and esoteric discourses). They are not romantasies of the ogre-meets-princess Shrek variety of course. They are higher-order romantasies; Straussian Strum und Drang grand narratives fueled by the sublime sentimental tendencies of Chosen Ones.

Romantasy (a portmanteau of romance and fantasy) is apparently the fastest growing category of genre fiction, and if you squint a bit, the governing narratives of our world fit the genre well. Science fiction proper, in the Chiang’s Law sense, is in retreat.

We are escaping not to truly different strange new worlds, but to worlds that depressingly mirror our own, built around caricatures of special people. The only difference is that romantasies reliably cater to specific narcissistic conceits, preferred Chosen Idols, and parasocial tendencies, in ways the real world does not.

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Protocolization Debt

Arguably this shift from dry ideology and philosophy to soaring romantasy has a very particular historical cause: An accumulation of unprotocolized technological evolution awaiting processing.

Between the death of Leo Strauss in 1973, and 2025, our world has been utterly transformed by wave after wave of new technologies, harnessing a growing range of natural phenomena, each governed by strange new natural laws that require strange new artificial rules to harness. Strange new rules that must be mastered through effort. Rules that induce strange new world geometries to which there are no royal roads.

We have fallen way behind on the task of creating new kinds of order out of all this rich and wild new technological phenomenology. We are groaning under a vast amount of protocolization debt.

An idea we quote often in the Summer of Protocols is relevant here: Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

In our fledgling research community, we refer to achieving “Whitehead advances” as the core work of protocolization. These are not Great Leaps (or Great Regulations or Great Accelerations) that precipitate utopian end-states overnight. Rather, they are humble and concrete behavior changes that diffuse slowly through the population, as we all learn to live by new rules en masse. Rules like washing hands with soap before doing surgeries. Or following traffic signals. Or learning new opsec rules concerning encrypted communications and private keys.

So one way to understand protocolization debt is Whitehead advances waiting to happen.

Nature, as the saying goes, abhors a vacuum. So in the absence of Whitehead advances, hordes of self-styled Chosen Ones across the world have rushed in to colonize the wild new technologically generated territories.

There is an interesting mental model we can employ here: that of pioneer species. Pioneer species are plant species that are very quick and aggressive in colonizing unoccupied new territories (such as those created by clear-cutting or forest fires). From a human point-of-view, pioneer species are often nuisance species or weeds.

But they do have an important role to play, since they pave the way for more robust colonization by slower, but richer ecologies, via a process known as primary succession.

So, even though it is an unflattering metaphor, the idea of pioneer species affords us a useful perspective on Chosen Ones and the Straussian romantasies that fuel their behaviors. Despite their tendency to make invasive nuisances of themselves, and their relentless efforts to capture and hold on to power, during periods of rapid change and accumulating protocolization debt, they do have an important role to play.

But if pioneer species establish too strong an early dominance, and become too hard to displace, the entire ecology collapses.

If, however, a healthy process of primary succession kicks in, the wilderness gets slowly tamed by a series of Whitehead advances. The strange new environment gets protocolized. Strange new rules appear, causing the Chosen Ones to retreat and allowing ordinary people to acquire new literacies, make new gains, and enjoy a better world.

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Worlds and Rules

Perhaps the best illustration of Chiang’s Law and the science fiction/fantasy distinction is Star Trek vs. Star Wars. While there is a lot to dislike about the politics of Star Trek﹣it is a militarized, casteist, rigid social-democratic bureaucracy managed by percentages, spreadsheets, and arbitrary conventions﹣it is definitely a world where rules rather than people, are special. In some ways, the Prime Directive is the star of the show, and the grand narrative is about figuring out how to apply it, and when and where to make exceptions systematically, rather than with sovereign arrogance.

Authority on the command deck goes with whoever is sitting in the captain’s chair, not with the titular captain. And a deep bench of officers is prepared to sit in it. Authority transfer is a routine and unremarkable element in the plots, even on the occasions when young and inexperienced officers find themselves in the captain’s chair.

The trope of the captain’s chair in Star Trek is a fine example of a Whitehead advance displacing a Chosen One cultural pattern. It is a true Round Table, with no King Arthur marked as special by virtue of possession of a mythic sword. A classic Monty Python sketch makes this point:

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Arthur: Shut up!

Dennis: I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!

Arthur: [grabs Dennis] Shut up! Will you shut up?!

Dennis: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Even Captain Kirk, portrayed as inventive and subversive, usually acts according to protocol. He is often imaginative and creative, but rarely autocratic or arbitrary. In the franchise, Chosen One societies, such as Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians, and Khan Noonien Singh’s band, are typically antagonists of the Federation. Even the Borg have a queen, and the mercantilist Ferengi a “Grand Nagus.”

The Federation? It has protocols.

The opening voice-over famously includes a phrase that is useful for us: strange new worlds.

Good new protocols enable us to venture into truly strange new worlds, where following the rules is our only hope for staying alive. In the beginning, these strange new worlds may require strange new rules that we can never dismiss from acute consciousness. But over time, they sink into the collective unconscious, as Whitehead advances, and turn into familiar old rules for familiar old worlds, freeing up energy to yet again discover new strange worlds to venture into.

Today, in 2025, we don’t have to venture into outer space to find strange new worlds. We are barreling headlong into strange new regimes of natural laws we thought we understood. The climate is starting to do things so strange, our own planet is starting to seem alien to us. Silicon and copper﹣“rocks we tricked into thinking with lightning”﹣are starting to do such strange things that our own minds are becoming unfamiliar to us. The curious chemical compounds known as GLP-1 agonists are radically rewiring both our fundamental drives and desires, and our loftiest philosophical sensibilities.

This is not a world you can trust to the supposed genius of Great Men or to the supposed enlightenment of Great Bureaucrats.

We are already deep into strange new worlds that require us to formulate and live by strange new rules. Rules that reflect the strange new logics, and apply in the same way to all.

It is time to protocolize!

1. The Summer of Protocols program is primarily funded by the Ethereum Foundation at a modest level, with some support from a few partner institutions. We use our funds primarily for summer research grants and in-person research events. The program was inspired by hard protocol problems relating to the Ethereum blockchain, but is not restricted to blockchains. We have funded, and will continue to fund, research on a broad spectrum of protocol-related themes. Contributions to Protocolized will be paid for out of this budget for the time being, but we will be exploring other means to make this sustainable.